I’ve got a great roundup of what’s going on in the World of TEFL blogs this month. Enjoy…

• The Easiest Speaking Game in the World – Kalinago English
• Dogme vs CLIL – TEFL Tastic
• Adam’s adventures in mind mapping – Year in the life of an English teacher
• Dogme in the mind of a teacher: Memory techniques – Turklish TEFL
• E is for ELF (and the Phonological Core) - Scott Thornbury’s A-Z of ELT
• Free Music For Kids – The English corner
• Is using a coursebook really a bad thing? – Shaun Wilden’s blog
• Grammar: Where and how do we put it in coursebooks? – English Raven
• Popular movies – Teaching English online using scenes from YouTube – The TEFL Times

If you’ve written something good recently, let me know and I’ll include it in my next roundup.

Kalinago English

The inaugural ELT World TEFL website of the month award goes to the incredibly popular blog created by freelance teacher Karenne Sylvester. This wonderful blog is written specifically for English teachers who lean towards using technology in their classrooms.

Karenne’s blog has mastered what many aspire to in that it has a real sense of community; her conversational style of writing seems to encourage both response and debate from the blog’s many followers. As well as a wealth of interesting posts on the use of social bookmarking, Twitter, and YouTube for teaching purposes, she is currently running a series of thought provoking ‘dogme’ challenges which will pique the interest of many a browsing teacher. You can follow Karenne’s tweets via @kalinagoenglish, but whatever you do, don’t miss the October 2010 ELT World TEFL website of the month, Kalinago English.

Richard Byrne at ‘Free Technology for Teachers‘ has put together a great list of things for teachers to do this year. From building a blog / wiki to utilising social networks, the list comes with instructions on how to implement each in your classrooms.

Click here to go to the list.

How to Fix Our Schools: A Manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Other Education Leaders

Washington, DC, United States: As educators, superintendents, chief executives and chancellors responsible for educating nearly 2 1/2 million students in America, these people know that the task of reforming the country’s public schools begins with us. It is their obligation, notes the Washington Post, to enhance the personal growth and academic achievement of our students, and we must be accountable for how our schools perform.

Read more about this here…

I can’t even hazard a guess as to what this might be, which is why I’m going to have the cold cow in west in special grade picks, which I hear is delicious at this time of year. Click on the image for a clearer view.

An ESL teacher in Saigon wrote to Antonio Graceffo at the Foreign Policy Journal: “As you may have worked out already, the pronunciation of Vietnamese ESL learners is not great. I am looking at ways to try and improve the pronunciation of the learners at my school.”

“As a linguist, do you have any insights into spoken English and the difficulties that syllable-timed L1s (Vietnamese people) might have learning a stressed-timed L2 language?”

Read more about this here…

You can forget “the Queen’s English”, a term that dates back to 1592 and is snobbily defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the English language as regarded as under the guardianship of the Queen; hence, standard or correct English”. It’s “Streetsmart English” or perhaps more accurately, “Self-reliance English” that is increasingly the need in India, according to the Times of India at least.

This is all just another way of describing a “Khul ja sim sim” tongue, one that enables self-reliance and provides the magic words to open up hitherto off-limits treasures… information, opportunity, salaries, upward mobility.

Read more about this…

Mmmm… I think I’ll go for the fresh fruit sand.

Here’s a nice link to a discussion of the top ten inventions we’re likely to see this century; good for discussing the future. Each invention has an accompanying video clip.